hopes raised, hopes dashed

I saw a headline that The U.S. would resettle Iraqi refugees and I thought that sanity had reared its head in the U.S.

And then I read the article and I see that the U.S. will accept only 7000 Iraqi refugees. That leaves somewhere in the vicinity of 1,599,993,000 U.S. created Iraqi refugees to fend for themselves.

What the U.S. *should* do (but it won't, of course, since this would be merely good, but not necessarily leading to any financial benefit to any americans) would be to get out of Iraq (yes, it'll descend into chaos, but the Iraqis will carve out a peace for themselves after a few generations, and if the Americans don't leave, exactly the same chaos will exist, except there'll a thousand Americans dead and five thousand wounded every year [the casualty rate is increasing]). And then, for the next ten years, the U.S. should take that several hundred billion dollars a year and pay it in reparations to the Iraqi people (individually, to people, not to the government) and a similar amount for repatriation costs to all the Iraqi refugees who have fled the country because of the chaos and death.

It'll never happen though. Even $100 million in reparations, a drop in the bucket and not enough for anything will never get granted.